The Decline of Chicago: The City that Doesn't Work (Evanston: oceanfront, 2009)

[edsg25]

my bias is probably painfully obvious. i detest the whole "is chicago in decline/is _______ in decline" nonsense. Ignore what follows if you don't wish to read one guy's opinion, giving with perhaps a bit too much length.

is chicago in decline? sure. all cities are in decline. and rising. simultenously. both forces are constantly at play.

what is the real stupidity of "is chicago in decline?" it's that it comes from people who show total ignorance of urban issues and the concept of major city in 2009.

back a half century or more ago, post-WWII, we didn't create two "divisions" for our large American cities. New York, we knew, was in its own universe and was cosmopolitan and reaching outward to the world. The rest of the cities...not so much. and truthfully very little at all.

Their claim to "international status": ethnic groups from other lands which were actually virtually all either European through immigration of choice or African through forced immigration.

Other than that, they were just....well....American cities. Chicago may have been the big kid on the midwestern block and the region's true crossroads, but its structure and function weren't all that different from Detroit, Cleveland, or St. Louis.

LA at the time was little more than neck-and-neck with a San Francisco that loved to lord its superiority over its southern Calif little borther as the true center for the west coast, but LA wasn't even "major league" at a time when Jackie Robinson played for the Brooklyn Dodgers.

thus keeping the major league metaphor going, the NL and AL cities like Chicago, St. Louis, Baltimore, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, etc. (with the exception of New York) were sort of grouped together in that category of "large cities".

But not today. The US in 1950 was national; today it is global. In 1950, US cities played off each other; today they play off of Frankfort and Hong Kong and Buenos Aires.

And the big boys come with their own label(s): alpha city, global city.

And that's it in a nutshell, folks: CHICAGO IS A GLOBAL CITY.:

* it is networked with the great cities in the world

* Chicago's commodity exchanges are a big part of the global economy

* White collar jobs cluster here in great numbers at a time when the smaller "major cities" are left behind with nothing to replace their antiquated industrial past

* Chicago's role as a transportation hub and a center for small to large, McCPl size meetings serves both nation and planet

* Universities like the U of C and NU give Chicago an edge in the extremely important field of education, roots it shares with places like Boston and the Bay Area.

* The cultural and quality-of-life infrastructure has been painfully put in place over the centuries. It's there and it contributes. Big time. In an age when cities have to sell themselves, not just their job opportunities, a place like Millennium Park pays huge dividends.

New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles are considered America's most global cities; they may well be a category on to their own. Nobody will feel uncomfortable (I believe) if the concept also has root in places like San Francisco, Boston, and Washington.

All those cities, in varying degrees, have something special going for them in this global age that so many of the rest of our US cities do not. I don't want to single out any US city in negative terms here, so I will just put it this way:

Generic-City-A, its population around the 700,000 mark, perhaps at 900,000 four or five decades back, lives with the loss of jobs without replacement as the industrial age in America slithered to virtual extinction. It may have grabbed some of the new economies, but not nearly enough. Certainly its draw is not global and that hurts it. It's older, flatter relationship with the Chicago's and LA's out there is gone; it stands behind them, a whole different category today.

I'm not sugar coating Chicago's problems. They are enormous, and often disheartening. But that's the nature of the urban beast. And in these lean times that were created by our nation's errors and misdeeds, not our cities (although NY's Wall Street is indeed a metaphor for those problems). The cities suffer as the nation itself does.

But this discussion on "decline" deals with "relative decline" and it seems to me, relateively speaking, I'd easily take a bet on Chicago's relative position over that of the vast majority of US cities and even odds with those few, rare cities that are "on top".

If opinions count (and this is strictly that: opinion), I think this whole Chicago Decline thing is pure nonsense and unsupported by global facts.

[edsg25]

WARNING!...the rant continues.

I've accused some people (not by name) as knowing nothing about cities. It gets worse. These folks know nothing about metropolitan areas.

Cities are irrelevant. Their government provides a limited amount of services in the form of schools, libraries, police, fire, streets & san,, and little else. Some like Chicago exert leadership through their mayor. You can like or dislike Rich Daley - and there are grounds for both - but he does work on the "vission" thing more than the vast majority of mayors and has had enough pull to pull it off.

But truth is, even with that, cities just don't count. They are part of metropolitan areas and life doesn't change on the other side of the street...be it Austin Blvd into Oak Park or Howard into Evanston.

Metropolitan areas represent the cities that were as they were placed on steroids.

Thus you can't talk Woodlawn without discussing Winnetka or Back-of-the-Yards without talking about Barrington Hills. They are all rooted in the same economic engine that does not stop where the city stops but goes north into Wisconsin, west across the Fox River, south to a possible future Peotone Airport and east into Indiana.

San Francisco and Boston, small cities, are more relevant and more important than huge Houston, IMHO. Why? SF and Boston size are relevant....the Bay Area and metro Boston are huge, bigger than metro Houston. Houston makes up a huge majority of its own metro area. City limits don't matter.

Not even in Detroit. How absurd it would be to think Grosse Point or Birmingham or other extremely wealthy and even upper middle class areas of metro Detroit benefit in any way by the hole in the doughnut that that metro area created for itself in the devastation of the city of Detroit. You can escape the city as location, but you bring the city's problems with you. And if there is any doubt, compare the price of suburban Chicago real estate with that of suburban Detroit. And if you think an region that creates a black and white divide with blacks condemned to poverty in this multicultural, global world of ours can attract business, guess again. Sorry, bigots (not saying there are any on this thread, mind you; nobody has given that indication here), black folks add to diversity and are not the minus your pea brains thought they were, but a definite plus in needed diversity.

New York can call outer Queens or Staten Island the city, but they are suburban in nature, little different from close in suburbs of Chicago which just happen to lie outside city limits.

Same for LA...the Valley has always been a suburban enclave even if it is a part of LA. Same is true for virtual suburbs on the westside in the form of Bel Air or Brentwood or Westwood.

How we organize our suburban or urban areas...in the city or in its suburbs....is irrelevant. They're still part of the same urban fabric no matter which city they are a part.

Again, I feel it is time to have serious discussions here, ones that show that we understand what cities and metro areas are all about.

[JoeyPants]

Originally Posted by frankenberry

I swear the train took us only 45 minutes on the weekend but I could be wrong. By car for sure. Anyway my point was that I live in McHenry(not Mchenry) which isn't 80 miles away and it's still cheaper than Chicago for just about everything. I do not need to live 4 feet from my neighbor's house and eat Americanized middle eastern food in order to feel cultured.

And Buffalo NY is cheaper then Manhattan, as Rockford is Cheaper than Chicago. There is a reason, and it's not just greed. It's called demand. See how many people are willing to pay $1,000 for a one bedroom 750 square foot apartment in McHenry or any exburb. City living may not appeal to you, but it appeals to many others, enough to sustain the high prices.

Location, location, location.

Chicago, like many other cities have suffered set backs since the mid 1950's due to cheap gasoline and the proliferation of the expressways. Recent trend has began to shift back to the cities for the past 15 years and will continue once gas prices skyrocket. Expect American cities to resemble European cities, the wealthiest in the core and the slums in the suburbs. Plenty of articles by sociologists and urban planners have been written about this.

[MoItaly]

Originally Posted by frankenberry
Most areas of Chicago outside the Loop and River North are pretty sketchy these days.
**
So, Old Town, Bucktown, Hyde Park, Greektown, Wrigleyville are all sketchy?

Or maybe you meant to say that there are SOME sketchy areas in SOME parts of Western and Southern Chicago?

Yes, Chicago needs some works, like any other big city. There are areas that need to be taken care of, but don't think that Chicago has a unique situation. I feel much safer walking around Chicago than Baltimore for example, and Chicago is much bigger.

[Lookout Kid]

Chicago's primary period of decline took place from 1955-1991, and since the early nineties it's very apparent that Chicago has been booming, sans this financial mess we're in right now.

1991 was the peak for violent crime in Chicago, and crime rates have dropped tremendously since then. We've had some years with small gains in the 2000s, but we've also had years with small drops--and our crime rates are MUCH lower than they were in the early 90s pretty much across the board.

Gentrification in Lincoln Park, Old Town, etc. definitely started before 1991, but it really picked up momentum in the 90s. Large swaths of the city that were looking pretty dingy in the early 90s have bounced back or been transformed (though some may regret the loss of character and businesses that has occurred).

Many neighborhoods have continued the "white flight" decline--usually further out from the Loop. But this is merely a continuation of the patterns that started in the decades after WWII, and the tide of gentrification has been a more significant phenomenon in my opinion. There has also been a massive influx of new housing units where none existed before in and around the Loop.

[JoeisSweet]

Well at least the picture in the article says something nice about the city.

That picture makes the Gold Coast and Lake Shore Drive look like Miami!

[grapico]

edsg25...ahh great post, and my 6 favorite cities though i might throw philly in there to make a lucky 7... nyc/bos/phi/dc/chi/sf/la ...they all share the global connectiveness and history of top universities.

[edsg25]

Originally Posted by grapico

edsg25...ahh great post, and my 6 favorite cities though i might throw philly in there to make a lucky 7... nyc/bos/phi/dc/chi/sf/la ...they all share the global connectiveness and history of top universities.

thanks, grapico....and philly unquestionably and constantly is underrated and could easily make it a lucky 7.

i'm afraid, however, the Phillies won't be making it to a win in the lucky 7th WS game, ending up gone before that one is even played

[SAI126]

Originally Posted by Lookout Kid

Chicago's primary period of decline took place from 1955-1991, and since the early nineties it's very apparent that Chicago has been booming, sans this financial mess we're in right now.

1991 was the peak for violent crime in Chicago, and crime rates have dropped tremendously since then. We've had some years with small gains in the 2000s, but we've also had years with small drops--and our crime rates are MUCH lower than they were in the early 90s pretty much across the board.

Gentrification in Lincoln Park, Old Town, etc. definitely started before 1991, but it really picked up momentum in the 90s. Large swaths of the city that were looking pretty dingy in the early 90s have bounced back or been transformed (though some may regret the loss of character and businesses that has occurred).

Many neighborhoods have continued the "white flight" decline--usually further out from the Loop. But this is merely a continuation of the patterns that started in the decades after WWII, and the tide of gentrification has been a more significant phenomenon in my opinion. There has also been a massive influx of new housing units where none existed before in and around the Loop.

Excellent post, which is no surprise at least to me. I have highlighted my areas of concern, which I think is a better word than disagreement in this case. Let's just say that from 1955-91 Chicago was on the express train of decline but since then has switched to the local. I still see it declining, albeit it more slowly and with some elements of resurgence you have described. Also, and this is not to nitpick in any way, the period from the mid 60s to mid 70s was an era of skyrocketing crime. I remember over 1000 homicides in the city in 1974.

[Chicago60614]

^ I definitely wouldn't NOT say that the city in general has been on the local train to decline from 1991 to 2009. Go back and look at the general state of the CTA from then to now, the financial health of the city, the general cleanliness, the rebuilt Kennedy, Stevenson, Wacker Drive, Dan Ryan, hundreds of new highrises downtown, much higher levels of tourism and downtown workers, school infrastructure and public housing conditions, etc. While the past year has been bad, that's an issue across the entire country right now - it's not really a long term trend.

Up until the early 1990's you could say that a majority of neighborhoods were still on their slow to fast decline compared to 1950.

Look at a majority of neighborhoods around the city from 1991 to 2009 as benchmarks and you'll find either improvements, or at least stable.

We hear all the time about the really horrible areas of the city - but for the most part the city is either steadily getting better, or more often just holding its ground. And yes, I know about sections of Austin, Englewood, etc. I still have to wonder though if even the worst neighborhoods of 2009 are actually on the way up compared to where they sat and where they were going 20 years ago.